“When I hired you, I thought you could write!”
junior staffers, bad prose, imposter syndrome
Being a junior employee can be a constant state of faking it till you make it. When it comes to writing, that makes it easy to get things very wrong.
Imagine, for example, a first-year pr associate who’s assigned to write a pitch about a hotel. Here’s what he turns in:
Located on an exclusive chic and fashionable peninsula, luscious elite and elegant hotel boasts stunning, beautiful, sophisticated, rooms with outstanding ravishing and delightful déco that is a perfect match and reflection for your own cosmopolitan cultured suave style for unforgettable upscale high-toned getaways sure to please.
Now what are you, his supervisor, supposed to do with that?
Not unreasonably, you make some assumptions. It seems your employee doesn’t have much of a grip on grammar or syntax. He hasn’t bothered to do his research. He hit the thesaurus and threw in every word he could find. He doesn’t know how to proofread or edit, or he just assumed you’d do it for him.
You were so excited when he joined your team! He looked so promising! He aced the writing test! How did you get it so wrong?
I’ve seen situations like this more times than I can count. And I’m here to tell you that you probably didn’t get it wrong at all.
Your new staffer just needs a little help getting past some pretty serious imposter syndrome.
Let’s take another look at your hotshot hire.
He started working for your agency straight out of college. He hasn’t been to the ultra-luxury hotel he’s writing about—in fact, he hasn’t set foot in any luxury hotel ever. He’s never been to the country where the hotel is located: he doesn’t even own a passport. His travel so far has consisted of trips to see his grandparents in another state and a couple of spring breaks in Miami. He doesn’t have the money to stay in fancy places like this one, and neither does anybody he knows. He’s out of his depth.
He looks at the website, and he sees shots of people who could have stepped straight out of The Great Gatsby or The Real Housewives. He pictures formal wear, table settings with many forks, fine art. It’s all pretty intimidating—in fact, it seems like another planet. How is he supposed to talk to people who think spending this kind of money on a hotel is no big deal? No wonder he’s overdressing his prose like it’s Cinderella on her way the ball.
Or take the case of a junior analyst tasked with writing a position paper. This analyst was a straight-A poli-sci/economics major at a big-deal college. You actually read her thesis and you thought it was right on the money. That’s why you hired her. So why is she handing you this?:
The policy issue which we have at hand at the moment is perennially complex and involves the requirement that all parties acquiesce in concurring to the state the economic and socio-economic state of being at the outset in order to effectively avoid a situation of autarky through disintermediation.
It’s murky. It’s wordy. It says nothing. She’s writing like a robot with a screw loose. What is happening here?
Well. The analyst may be plenty smart, but that means she’s smart enough to know she’s got to impress everybody all the time if she wants to succeed in business. The people who will be reading this report are senators and congresspeople and think-tank types. The author credited on the front page is her near-mythical CEO. She hasn’t the slightest idea how to channel his voice. She’s thoroughly freaked out.
So she turns to big words and long sentences. She sets out to wow her audience with complication, indirection, and super-formal language. Along the way, she loses control of basics of syntax and grammar—she even makes spelling mistakes. The result? A paper that nobody understands and nobody wants to read.
Then there’s the junior person who’s inviting guests to an event. You’ve asked them to write the invites on your behalf. You’re pretty sure they know what you sound like. And yet they come up with this:
Dearest Margaret, I am so very thrilled and extremely pleased to personally extend an invitation to you to atend as my personal guest with a plusone on the very special occasion of the exlusive opening of Emma North’s stunning work at the imcomparable Gallery Fab.
I mean.
It’s tempting to look at materials like these and decide that you’ve made some pretty serious hiring decisions: your person is not really trying, or they’re not very bright, or they’re a hopelessly bad writer. It’s this new generation, it’s laziness, it’s working from home, it’s TikTok (“hey guys!”).
But in each of these cases, there’s a simple reason why juniors struggle to write well:
they don’t feel like they have any authority to say anything.
They don’t really understand that the target reader is a human person. They’re desperately scrambling to look smart and sophisticated. They’re perhaps a little bit scared of their bosses and supervisors. And so they lose their grip.
What to do? Because it’s not as easy, obviously, as simply telling a staffer, “you do so have authority.” Imposter syndrome is real. But you have to do something, unless you want to resign yourself to rewriting everything your junior person hands you.
The key lies in the writing process. Start with content.
Folks who are new to professional writing often don’t have what you would call a writing process. They cut and paste; they start writing without any kind of plan; they lose track of their goals. They try to get to the end product right away, without figuring out exactly what they want to say and why they want to say it first.
So ask your folks to start with the facts. Tell them to look for specifics : how is your hotel spa different from all the other hotel spas? What makes your proposal better than the competition’s? The more concrete they can be, the better.
If you have interesting facts to share, you don’t need to overdecorate your prose with adjectives.
Instead of calling a new line of dresses “stunning,” “beautiful,” and “alluring,” wouldn’t it be more interesting to talk about the designer’s inspiration or one-of-a-kind fabric sourcing?
What if, instead of insisting that a new hotel is “hot,” “exotic,” and “lovely,” you could tell a travel writer about an experience she could have nowhere else?
Or instead of telling a policymaker or a funder that your point of view is “urgent” or “state of the art,” you could simply demonstrate, through proof points, why you’re right?
Once the facts are clear and there’s a working draft on the page, it’s much easier to edit for voice as a separate activity.
Want to help your new hires avoid the three-dollar words at this stage?
Ask them to humanize their audience with some straightforward questions.
How would they discuss this out loud?
On the phone?
If they were talking to their parents, or to their college professor, or to the person at the next table in a restaurant?
Nine times out of ten, even the most intimidated junior person can get to clearer, more cogent writing—if they’re equipped with a tool kit that sets them up for success. That is fabulously absolutely in all cases almost wonderfully and exclusively true.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
Interested in helping your team write better prose?